For A More Joyful Life, Write An Ode To The Asshole Who Lives In Your Head

You never got over Shakespearean sonnets in high school.

You can’t see any way poetry can be helpful to you, a life-hacking productivity wizard. You just want to live your life to its fullest, get out of your way, and be successful.

Poetry can get you there faster.

I’m taking a poetry workshop this week with world-class poets Ellen Bass and Marie Howe for 8 hours a day. Today’s lesson was on odes, poems of praise of people, places, or things. And since you can’t praise someone by shitting on them, odes are joyful.

Joy is hard to pin down in words. 

We have all sorts of precise language to describe pain, physical and emotional. But we struggle to express our expansive and fuzzy joy. 

But, if you stop to savor those moments of joy and write them down as precisely as you can, they become memorable. Our brains crush on the extraordinary, so when your world is falling apart, your trained-in-joy brain will help you rebound faster.

Even better, write an ode to the parts of you that you despise. By praising all your shameful bits (body, character, things you’ve done or left undone), you’ll make peace with yourself. They’re often well-intentioned but clueless. Find humor in the darkness and develop self-compassion.

You don’t expect the people you love to be perfect. Why should you be the exception?

Learn to love the parts that make you human, not perfect, and you’ll live to your fullest.

Photo credit: Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash